A game with a lot of charm that when it's all working at its best can be very satisfying and fun, but I also think the game can get a little overly cruel with stuff like boss fights and certain enemies when you're also trying to deal with extremely unwieldy and unreliable AI pathfinding that feels like a coinflip when your Pikmin do what you're trying to make them do. I also really would recommend staying away from the original GameCube release because of the lack of being able to select specific Pikmin to throw, as it's something that the Wii and Switch ports added alongside new pointer controls that I could see making the game vastly easier to manage.

It's a game designed around replay runs where you know the game inside and out and know how to deal with its quirks and know what's coming, which honestly just isn't a kind of game design I particularly like. The first playthrough is the one that makes the most important impressions and while towards the end I think elements of Pikmin's design started to click and make sense, I don't think it's enough to really convince me to replay this anytime soon. Maybe my mind will change when I get my hands on the Switch ports when Nintendo releases the physical copies they stupidly held out for September on.